arXiv subjects

Mario Campanelli

Publications and source records attributed to Mario Campanelli.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Using Large Language Models in Physics Education

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced new possibilities and challenges in physics education, necessitating rigorous evaluation of their capabilities as both problem solvers and automated assessors. This paper presents the results of three complementary studies that evaluated frontier models released between mid-2024 and late-2025. Models were assessed on their ability to generate accurate, step-by-step solutions to university-level physics problems in Classical Mechanics, Electromagnetism, and Quantum Mechanics, and subsequently on their reliability in grading student solutions against a formal mark scheme. The results indicate a clear trajectory toward benchmark saturation in text-based reasoning, with recent architectures (such as ChatGPT-5.1 and Gemini 3.0 Pro) achieving near-perfect scores. Furthermore, recent advances in native multimodal integration have resolved previous limitations in spatial geometry and topological interpretation, enabling models to accurately process accompanying diagrams. As automated assessors, newer models demonstrated significant improvements in alignment with human grading, heavily mitigating the systemic over-marking observed in earlier iterations. However, while models reliably evaluate fully correct handwritten work, assigning partial credit to flawed or incomplete reasoning remains a persistent challenge. These findings suggest that as of late 2025, LLMs offer viable support for both independent student learning and instructional automation, provided their limitations in evaluating ambiguous reasoning are actively managed.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2024

Using AI Large Language Models for Grading in Education: A Hands-On Test for Physics

Grading assessments is time-consuming and prone to human bias. Students may experience delays in receiving feedback that may not be tailored to their expectations or needs. Harnessing AI in education can be effective for grading undergraduate physics problems, enhancing the efficiency of undergraduate-level physics learning and teaching, and helping students understand concepts with the help of a constantly available tutor. This report devises a simple empirical procedure to investigate and quantify how well large language model (LLM) based AI chatbots can grade solutions to undergraduate physics problems in Classical Mechanics, Electromagnetic Theory and Quantum Mechanics, comparing humans against AI grading. The following LLMs were tested: Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4, GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The results show AI grading is prone to mathematical errors and hallucinations, which render it less effective than human grading, but when given a mark scheme, there is substantial improvement in grading quality, which becomes closer to the level of human performance - promising for future AI implementation. Evidence indicates that the grading ability of LLM is correlated with its problem-solving ability. Through unsupervised clustering, it is shown that Classical Mechanics problems may be graded differently from other topics. The method developed can be applied to investigate AI grading performance in other STEM fields.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2022

The Forward Physics Facility: Sites, Experiments, and Physics Potential

The Forward Physics Facility (FPF) is a proposal to create a cavern with the space and infrastructure to support a suite of far-forward experiments at the Large Hadron Collider during the High Luminosity era. Located along the beam collision axis and shielded from the interaction point by at least 100 m of concrete and rock, the FPF will house experiments that will detect particles outside the acceptance of the existing large LHC experiments and will observe rare and exotic processes in an extremely low-background environment. In this work, we summarize the current status of plans for the FPF, including recent progress in civil engineering in identifying promising sites for the FPF and the experiments currently envisioned to realize the FPF's physics potential. We then review the many Standard Model and new physics topics that will be advanced by the FPF, including searches for long-lived particles, probes of dark matter and dark sectors, high-statistics studies of TeV neutrinos of all three flavors, aspects of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD, and high-energy astroparticle physics.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2021

Presenting Unbinned Differential Cross Section Results

Machine learning tools have empowered a qualitatively new way to perform differential cross section measurements whereby the data are unbinned, possibly in many dimensions. Unbinned measurements can enable, improve, or at least simplify comparisons between experiments and with theoretical predictions. Furthermore, many-dimensional measurements can be used to define observables after the measurement instead of before. There is currently no community standard for publishing unbinned data. While there are also essentially no measurements of this type public, unbinned measurements are expected in the near future given recent methodological advances. The purpose of this paper is to propose a scheme for presenting and using unbinned results, which can hopefully form the basis for a community standard to allow for integration into analysis workflows. This is foreseen to be the start of an evolving community dialogue, in order to accommodate future developments in this field that is rapidly evolving.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Performance of different photocathode materials in a liquid argon purity monitor

Purity monitor devices are increasingly used in noble gas time projection chambers to measure the lifetime of drifting electrons. Purity monitors work by emitting electrons from a photocathode material via the photoelectric effect. The electrons are then drifted towards an anode by means of an applied electric drift field. By measuring the difference in charge between the cathode and the anode, one can extract the lifetime of the drifting electrons in the medium. For the first time, we test the performance of different photocathode materials-- silver, titanium, and aluminium--and compare them to gold, which is the standard photocathode material used for purity monitors. Titanium and aluminium were found to have a worse performance than gold in vacuum, whereas silver showed a signal of the same order of magnitude as gold. Further tests in liquid argon were carried out on silver and gold with the conclusion that the signal produced by silver is about three times stronger than that of gold.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2019

Jet Substructure at the Large Hadron Collider: Experimental Review

Jet substructure has emerged to play a central role at the Large Hadron Collider, where it has provided numerous innovative ways to search for new physics and to probe the Standard Model, particularly in extreme regions of phase space. In this article we focus on a review of the development and use of state-of-the-art jet substructure techniques by the ATLAS and CMS experiments.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2019

Machine Learning in High Energy Physics Community White Paper

Machine learning has been applied to several problems in particle physics research, beginning with applications to high-level physics analysis in the 1990s and 2000s, followed by an explosion of applications in particle and event identification and reconstruction in the 2010s. In this document we discuss promising future research and development areas for machine learning in particle physics. We detail a roadmap for their implementation, software and hardware resource requirements, collaborative initiatives with the data science community, academia and industry, and training the particle physics community in data science. The main objective of the document is to connect and motivate these areas of research and development with the physics drivers of the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider and future neutrino experiments and identify the resource needs for their implementation. Additionally we identify areas where collaboration with external communities will be of great benefit.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2019

Searching for long-lived particles beyond the Standard Model at the Large Hadron Collider

Particles beyond the Standard Model (SM) can generically have lifetimes that are long compared to SM particles at the weak scale. When produced at experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, these long-lived particles (LLPs) can decay far from the interaction vertex of the primary proton-proton collision. Such LLP signatures are distinct from those of promptly decaying particles that are targeted by the majority of searches for new physics at the LHC, often requiring customized techniques to identify, for example, significantly displaced decay vertices, tracks with atypical properties, and short track segments. Given their non-standard nature, a comprehensive overview of LLP signatures at the LHC is beneficial to ensure that possible avenues of the discovery of new physics are not overlooked. Here we report on the joint work of a community of theorists and experimentalists with the ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb experiments --- as well as those working on dedicated experiments such as MoEDAL, milliQan, MATHUSLA, CODEX-b, and FASER --- to survey the current state of LLP searches at the LHC, and to chart a path for the development of LLP searches into the future, both in the upcoming Run 3 and at the High-Luminosity LHC. The work is organized around the current and future potential capabilities of LHC experiments to generally discover new LLPs, and takes a signature-based approach to surveying classes of models that give rise to LLPs rather than emphasizing any particular theory motivation. We develop a set of simplified models; assess the coverage of current searches; document known, often unexpected backgrounds; explore the capabilities of proposed detector upgrades; provide recommendations for the presentation of search results; and look towards the newest frontiers, namely high-multiplicity "dark showers", highlighting opportunities for expanding the LHC reach for these signals.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2015

Forward jets and large rapidity gaps

Hadronic jets are extremely abundant at the LHC, and testing QCD in various corners of phase-space is important to understand backgrounds and some specific signatures of new physics. In this article, various measurements aiming at probing QCD in configurations where the theory modeling become challenging are presented. Azimuthal angle de-correlations are sensitive to hard as well as soft QCD emission, and in most of the events jets are produced in a back-to-back configuration. Events where jets have a large rapidity separation are also rare, and those without additional radiation between the jets are exponentially suppressed. The modeling of radiation between very forward and backward jets is complicated, and may require theoretical tools different with respect to those normally used for central, high-pt events. Observables can be created that are sensitive to all these effects, like the study of azimuthal angle de-correlations between events where the two leading jets have large rapidity separations. The two general-purpose detectors of the LHC have measured these observables, and for some of them interesting deviations with respect to the most commonly used theoretical models are observed.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2009

Reducing multi-dimensional information into a 1-d histogram

We present two methods for reducing multidimensional information to one dimension for ease of understand or analysis while maintaining statistical power. While not new, dimensional reduction is not greatly used in high-energy physics and has applications whenever there is a distinctive feature (for instance, a mass peak) in one variable but when signal purity depends on others; so in practice in most of the areas of physics analysis. While both methods presented here assume knowledge of the background, they differ in the fact that only one of the methods uses a model for the signal, trading some increase in statistical power for this model dependence.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2004

Charm physics at Tevatron

The first period of the Tevatron Run II has been dominated by low-Pt physics. Both detectors, and their trigger/DAQ systems have been largely modified to exploit as much as possible the large wealth of charm and beauty hadrons produced by the machine, with improvements in the tracking system, magnetic field, specific triggers based on on-line track reconstruction. Thanks to these improvements, Tevatron experiments are competitive with dedicated machines, not only for heavier beauty states but also for charm, both in leptonic and hadronic decays.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2002

Effects of new physics in neutrino oscillations in matter

A new flavor changing electron neutrino interaction with matter would always dominate the nu_e oscillation probability at sufficiently high neutrino energies. Being suppressed by theta_{13}, the energy scale at which the new effect starts to be relevant may be within the reach of realistic experiments, where the peculiar dependence of the signal with energy could give rise to a clear signature in the nu_e --> nu_tau channel. The latter could be observed by means of a coarse large magnetized detector by exploiting tau --> mu decays. We discuss the possibility of identifying or constraining such effects with a high energy neutrino factory. We also comment on the model independent limits on them.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2002

European accelerator-based neutrino projects

Future neutrino projects in Europe will follow two distinct time lines. On the medium term, they will be dominated by the CERN-Gran Sasso long-baseline project, with two experiments OPERA and ICARUS, mainly concentrated on $τ$ appearance. On the longer term, several projects are under discussion. A new proton driver at CERN that accelerates a 4 MW beam to 2.2 GeV of energy would open the possibility of a low-energy super-beam, possibly sent to the French laboratory under the Frejus. A new radioactive heavy ion facility could produce a pure $ν_e$ beam, to be used independently or simultaneously with the super-beam. In the framework of R&D for Super-Beam and Neutrino Factory, the HARP experiment is studying hadron production at low energies on various targets.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2000

The experimental future of Neutrino Oscillations

After the recent experimental results on neutrino oscillations, some shape starts to emerge from the puzzle. However, the situation is still far from being clarified. First of all, accommodating all experimental results in a single and simple framework is not possible, and the possibility of sterile neutrinos entering the oscillation process has not been ruled out. Moreover, new questions arise that the presently-available data, nor those that will be available in a near future, will be able to answer. In this paper some of these problems will be discussed, as well as the experimental guidelines for their clarification.

hep-ex↗

arXiv1999

Review on new Neutrino Oscillation Experiments

Driven by new experimental results, in the latest period several new neutrino oscillation experiments have been proposed. I will outline the main ideas behind the different proposals, in particular concerning atmospheric neutrinos and neutrinos from accelerated beams.

hep-ex↗